


Wherever you go

by vaguely_concerned



Series: Scoundrels and Thieves 'verse [31]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hanzo loves this man... so fucking much you guys, M/M, young mchanzo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-30
Updated: 2019-06-30
Packaged: 2020-05-31 06:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19420612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaguely_concerned/pseuds/vaguely_concerned
Summary: Hanzo clutches the phone so hard his knuckles ache. He is not, for the most part, a man given to indulging in fear; it would be a liability, considering his line of work. His heart gives a sick lurch at the hushed strangeness in Jesse’s voice, though, the blood freezing and shattering into razor-sharp shards in his veins. He knows intimately what a brave man sounds like when he thinks he’s about to die. “What the hell do you mean, if you don’t make it out of there?”Jesse breathes in audibly, a shivery, skittish sound.Jesse has a close call and some feelings are had about it.





	Wherever you go

**Author's Note:**

> Set at some point after ‘Have you tried baking’ but a while before ‘You can’t take it with you’! Also please rest assured that Jesse *is* going to be okay here haha

“Jesse?”

“Uh. Yeah. Hey. It’s me.”

“...I can hear that. Isn’t it the middle of the night over there? What — ” 

“I, uh, I ain’t got a lot of time, I just… just wanted to hear, um…” Jesse’s breath sounds rough and unsteady through the phone, like he’s been running. “Listen, if I don’t make it outta here — I wanted you to know… wanted to tell you that — ” 

“What.” Hanzo clutches the phone so hard his knuckles ache. He is not, for the most part, a man given to indulging in fear; it would be a liability, considering his line of work. His heart gives a sick lurch at the hushed strangeness in Jesse’s voice, though, the blood freezing and shattering into razor-sharp shards in his veins. He knows intimately what a brave man sounds like when he thinks he’s about to die. “What the hell do you mean, if you don’t make it out of there?”

Jesse breathes in audibly, a shivery, skittish sound.

“ _Jesse._ ”

Hanzo is very glad to be alone in his room. He hasn’t been afraid like this since that first night together, when he had woken up and seen Jesse’s sleeping face and the way he was still holding Hanzo’s hand and realized the extent of what he had just done, the immense, irrevocable stupidity he had allowed himself to yield to. 

“Tell me where you are,” Hanzo says, because he can’t think, can’t understand why the continents between them should mean anything. “I will come find you.” 

Jesse laughs, a sad hoarse rasp through the phone. “Ain’t gonna be time for that, I don’t think. I’m sorry.”

“ _Tell me what plane to take_ ,” Hanzo barks, then takes a deep breath to rein himself in — the walls are too thin to freely let him raise his voice. He closes his eyes, presses his hand against his brow, fights the sudden sense of vertigo. “I — whatever it is, I will come to you and we can…” 

There’s a strange noise from Jesse; a small, wistful sound of longing that pulls on something in Hanzo’s chest like a magnetic North.

“Jesse,” he says, helplessly. “Please.” 

“I love you,” Jesse says, soft and simple, like they’re curled up facing each other on a bed, their fingers tangled. Like that first night, when Jesse had opened his eyes and _smiled_ and Hanzo — had known. “That’s what I wanted to say.” 

Hanzo can say nothing at all to that. 

There’s a sound in the background of Jesse’s call, a distant yet ominous boom as if from something exploding with enough force to shake the ground. “Aw, shit, already? I, uh. I gotta go now. I’ll — I’ll get back to you.”

And then the call cuts. The only reason Hanzo doesn’t sit frozen on his bed forever is the coordinates he receives from Jesse’s number twenty seconds later.

——— 

Despite the occasional dramatics and eccentricities Jesse always delivers, and he delivers _big_. It is, Hanzo assumes, why his father is so willing to tactfully look the other way and not bring it up whenever a deal turns out to take a couple of days longer than one would expect, and why the rest of the family stay pointedly out of it; no one else can whip up a miracle with the same speed and consistency as Hanzo’s mysterious overseas contact. It is one of many things about Jesse Hanzo is grateful for — he does have Jesse suspected of keeping a few aces up his sleeve for just this purpose, in fact, which is downright romantic.

It’s probably the only thing that lets Hanzo leave within the hour with barely any questions asked. 

Hanzo stares out of the plane window to watch the desolate, ever-shifting landscape of the clouds beneath and feels as strange and insubstantial, as if everything within him has become as remote and as distant and as empty. 

When the text message with an address and a simple ‘ _Still kicking’_ ticks in he shoves his phone into a pocket and leaves the airport as fast as his legs will carry him. 

——— 

“It’s me,” Hanzo says right outside the door, and it swings open to reveal Jesse standing there in a wash of warm, grubby light spilling into the darkness, looking exhausted and worse for the wear but, crucially, miraculously, alive and whole. 

Hanzo glances past him into the dingy motel room to make sure they’re really alone, then steps inside and closes the door behind him before getting his arms around Jesse and pulling him close, his bag hitting the ground with a thump. Jesse gives a low grunt of pain and Hanzo stiffens, moving to step back.

“Oh — are you — ” 

“‘S okay, just bruised a couple of ribs again, I‘m fine,” Jesse murmurs, wrapping his arms around Hanzo’s shoulders and stopping him from moving away. Hanzo holds him more carefully this time, burying his fingers in his hair, listening to his breathing — it sounds shallow and rough but not unnaturally so, signifying tension rather than lasting damage. For a second he lets himself slide out of focus, turning his face into the curve of Jesse’s neck and reveling in the familiar smell of him, clear even under the dirt and blood clinging to his clothes even though it’s been almost two days already.

Something is wrong. Hanzo can’t put his finger on what, exactly, but the way Jesse holds himself is making alarm bells go off in the back of his head. It feels familiar in a way he can’t explain. 

“Are you hurt?” Hanzo asks, despite Jesse’s reassurances, stepping back to look him over again. His face is an ashen grey but for the bruise-dark circles under his eyes, and his hands are shaking badly enough that Hanzo can see it from this distance, but the rest of him is… too still.

“Nah, not really. Somehow got away with a shiner and a few regrets,” Jesse says, gesturing vaguely, then winces as he apparently jostles something in his torso. “…oof, plenty of regrets.” 

Hanzo snorts and reaches out to stroke Jesse’s cheek. Jesse shies away from his hand as if he’s afraid of getting burned and Hanzo hesitates, letting his hand falter and then fall away. A look of something fragile and complicated crosses Jesse’s face — for a second he looks bereft, almost, lost — but he’s the one to take a step back, fixing his features in a hard, brittle emulation of his usual nonchalance.

As Jesse looks away and walks over to the small table over by the wall, Hanzo curls and uncurls his fingers minutely at his sides, fighting down the impulse to reach out again until he understands the situation better. 

Leaning his hip against the edge of the table Jesse pulls out a packet of smokes and rolls himself a cigarette with more focus than warranted by an act that is essentially muscle memory at this point. Hanzo stands there right inside the door, still in his outerwear, and doesn’t say anything. 

“It’s good to see you,” Jesse says finally, and his voice is a civil war — Hanzo can tell that on some level he truly means it, in that same instinctual bone-deep way that makes him light up whenever they meet and that Hanzo knows because it lives within him too, but over that is a deliberate flatness, a hot stab of disingenuousness as if to see if Hanzo will flinch.

“I am happy to see you too,” Hanzo says blandly, not having worked out which of the mixed messages Jesse wants him to respond to yet. It seems, at least, not the _wrong_ approach; Jesse’s posture doesn’t change, neither towards openness nor hostility. 

“You shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble to come here, though,” Jesse says, cupping his trembling hand around the lighter and giving a grunt when the flame flickers out on the first try. 

“Shouldn’t I,” Hanzo says slowly, watching Jesse’s hands shake too badly to light the cigarette.

“Turned out okay in the end, didn’t it?”

“Did it?” 

The corner of Jesse’s mouth pulls down in anger in a way he clearly tries to play off as in response to his lighter sputtering out again, but Hanzo knows him too well to be fooled by it. “Well, I lived to tell the tale. Sorry if I gave you a scare back there, that’s my bad. Thought my odds were worse than they turned out to be.”

Hanzo takes a deep breath and unbuttons his coat, hanging it over the back of the room’s single rickety chair for lack of any better place to put it. Now in his shirtsleeves and having communicated that he doesn’t intend to go anywhere anytime soon, he folds his arms over his chest — Jesse’s watching him out of the corner of his eye, face still carefully non-committal. “So… what happened, exactly?”

The flame goes out a third time and Jesse spits out a curse and tosses the lighter down on the table, the unlit cigarette with it. He rubs his forehead with the tips of his fingers, briefly closes his eyes. Before he speaks he begins pacing back and forth over the floor; the room is too small to comfortably allow for his long loping strides and it looks eerily claustrophobic, the way he barely gets to take a few steps before he has to turn around again. 

“Well, uh. A few days ago a couple of our guys got taken by — well, doesn’t matter who, really. Suffice to say they’re another gang and there’s been bad blood there for a long time. They ain’t too happy with us, with, uh. Some justification, I guess.” His voice has gone deep and gravelly, which is usually enough to get Hanzo a little hot and bothered, but with the strange tension in the room it only feels wrong and unsettling, like entering a familiar room and finding it somehow changed.

“Taken?”

“Yeah. Ambush, they got jumped on the road. The rest of the guys got away in time but Bill, Morgan and Diaz got unlucky and the bad guys managed to surround ‘em. We found out a bit later they’d taken them back to their main base. Guess they probably wanted to interrogate them about the score they think we stole from under their noses last year.”

“And did you?”

Jesse gives an easy shrug that with supreme eloquence says: ‘Well, _stealin’_ is such a big word’. Even under the circumstances Hanzo feels the swell in his chest of how much he loves him, the amusement incongruous in this sad run down room. Jesse won’t look at him, though, his eyes flicking around like he’s watching for something.

“Needless to say our guys were up shit creek without as much as a canoe, never mind the paddle. So I, uh. Grabbed myself all the explosives I could feasibly carry and saddled up.” 

It takes a while for the implications of this to really sink in, but when Hanzo runs the sentence through three times in his head and finds no other explanation he demands: “Wait. You went in _alone?_ ”

Jesse shrugs again, tighter this time, still not looking at him. “No one else wanted to come. Said I was crazy, that it’d never work, they’d tried once already and we almost lost two more just from that. That it was gonna be too late anyway.” He gives a bitter little laugh, such a _wrong_ sound that Hanzo feels hairs raise on the back of his neck. “Guess they were right about that much, at least.”

“And so you thought you would try it all on your own?” Hanzo asks, incredulous more than accusatory though — well, it’s Jesse. He’s not even sure why he bothers to get surprised anymore at this point. 

The set of Jesse’s body changes subtly, finally shifts out of that unsettling stillness and becomes sharp, guarded, closed off, like a wounded wolf pacing back and forth trying to decide whether to run or to lash out. “What, you think they didn’t deserve it? That they weren’t worth givin’ it a shot? I’ve known those guys for almost ten years, Morgan has — h-had — two kids at home; when I was fifteen Diaz used to get me whatever stupid little cowboy knick-knack he could find whenever he went out, just ‘cause he thought it was funny the way I’d light up. They’ve done some shitty stuff in their time, sure,” his voice breaks slightly, “we all fuckin’ do, all the time, but they were _our_ guys and we shouldn’t’ve just left them to — ” 

“I never said you were wrong to try it. Loyalty is nothing to be ashamed of.” Jesse blinks at him, clearly derailed at Hanzo meeting his snarl with calmness. In truth Hanzo feels frozen in himself, intolerably clumsy, like he has been handed some precious family heirloom while too drunk to even properly stay on his feet and with his father’s eyes on him. “I am only questioning the tactical wisdom of entering an enemy stronghold on your own. Subtlety is not, hm, your usual modus operandi.” 

Hanzo, or maybe even Genji if he could keep sober for long enough, might probably have stolen into the place and out again with the prisoners without leaving anyone any the wiser, but that is a very specific skill set. Peacekeeper isn’t exactly optimized for stealth, and neither is Jesse’s character, for that matter.

Jesse rubs the back of his neck, meaning he’d known as much himself and gone ahead and done it anyway. “Well, I figured… I mean, don’t know that I was really thinking that far ahead, to be honest, but I’d set up one hell of a distraction and if everything went according to plan I’d have the three of them with me on the way out, but then that, I. That ain’t how it worked out.” 

His words are coming quicker now, slipping out like long-held prisoners climbing over each other in their urgency to escape. He’s started walking faster too, almost like he’s being hunted over the expanse of the ugly scuffed-up linoleum. 

“Jesse,” Hanzo begins, vaguely dreading what’s about to come. 

“They were dead when I got there,” Jesse says, stopping abruptly. “Had been for days, maybe. I thought I could, I’d planned — there should’ve been time to — but then Bill was the only one still breathin’ when I found ‘em and he stopped while I was cuttin’ the ropes and I didn’t even realize until he — ”

“Slow _down_ ,” Hanzo says, hearing the double edge of sharpness and pleading in his own voice. There is a part of him that, unused to fear, wants to shift into anger, into something he has a better handle on, but he looks at Jesse and knows that meeting this with harshness would be unforgivable. 

“Fuck,” Jesse says thinly, hiding his face in his hand and leaning one shoulder against the wall. “I screwed up, I screwed up so bad, they’re — they’re all gone.”

Hanzo stands in the middle of the floor and doesn’t know what to do. 

Jesse sinks down with his back to the wall. “If I’d been smarter about it, quicker, maybe I could’ve — ”

“Could have done what?” Hanzo says, as softly as he can. “Despite everything you are only one man. Real life is not — ”

 _Like your movies,_ he means to say, but it strikes him as cruel, taking that away from him right now, twisting the knife reality has already buried in him to the hilt. Hanzo is himself a terrible liar, has always been told he is too honest, too bound by the truth and inflexible, but he’s watched Jesse for long enough to know there can be value in finding a story of your own choosing and sticking to it, no matter what.

“Real life is not fair,” he decides on instead. “Sometimes you can commit no mistakes and still fail. Not everything is controllable.” 

His words come out surprisingly calm, considering the idea held within them often keeps him up at night. 

But Jesse doesn’t really seem to hear him, just sits there with his hands still in front of his face and his breathing gone strange and too quiet. 

Very carefully Hanzo kneels in front of him and reaches out to wrap his fingers around Jesse’s wrists, giving him a moment to move away or react before pulling his hands from his face. Jesse lets him take his hands but keeps his gaze fixed on the floor, refusing to meet Hanzo’s eyes.

He looks turned inwards, like he’s gone somewhere far away, somewhere nothing and no one can really touch him, not even Hanzo. 

The realization sits cold and flickering in Hanzo’s gut, an icy ember burning through his body. He can hardly stand that thought; it seems an unspeakable loss, one he doesn’t know how fit his life around. One he can’t accept. 

“Jesse,” he says, very quietly. “Please. Look at me.”

It takes a long time, but Hanzo is willing to wait, would give the rest of his life to Jesse if he needed it, were it his to give. When Jesse finally glances up it’s like a punch to the gut. 

He looks like he expects to be berated, or worse, and Hanzo wishes he could find whoever taught him that and… no matter, that doesn’t help anything right now. He cups Jesse’s cheek in his hand, notices the flutter of his eyelashes as he does with a depth of tenderness he would never think himself capable of. 

“Don’t leave me behind,” Hanzo says, brushing Jesse’s hair out of his forehead. “We are partners; wherever you go, let me come with you. Is that not part of the deal?”

Jesse looks at him and looks at him and looks at him, the moment suspended as if held in its own discrete private eternity. (Hanzo wouldn’t mind that, if this was where he stayed, if that meant Jesse wouldn’t be alone.)

He can’t say later exactly when the change came, when the last of Jesse’s defenses came crashing down and his face broke open, but he does know the precise feeling of Jesse leaning to rest his forehead against Hanzo’s shoulder as the first few sobs shudder through his frame. 

The relief trembles its way into Hanzo’s fingers; he cups the back of Jesse’s head in his hand and strokes his hair, steadying his shoulder with his other hand — he has next to no experience with this, outside of some half-remembered moments of comforting Genji when they were boys, but as hard as it is to hear Jesse in pain it is infinitely preferable to the feeling of losing him while he’s only an arm’s length away.

Jesse’s arms come up to wrap around him, clutching at him like a drowning man, and Hanzo cradles Jesse’s head against him, rocking him gently from side to side and making low nonsense sounds he hopes are comforting.

After a while he realizes Jesse is saying something, frantic whispered words muffled into Hanzo’s clothes.

“What was that?” Hanzo asks, leaning his head against the top of Jesse’s head and stroking the back of his neck. 

“Don’t go,” Jesse hitches out, hands white-knuckled where they clutch Hanzo’s shirt, “don’t go, please don’t leave me — ”

“ _Jesse_ ,” Hanzo breathes, something slithering down his spine like electricity and making him hug him even tighter. “Jesse, sssh, I am right here. I am not going anywhere.” 

Jesse lets out a sob like it has been torn out of him and mashes his face against Hanzo’s shoulder, leaning more of his weight into him. He cries into Hanzo’s chest, shoulders shaking as if something inside him means to shatter and break free. 

“Sssh,” Hanzo whispers again, nonsensically, stroking his fingers through the hair at the nape of Jesse’s neck. He doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s doing here, but he can’t bear the thought of letting go of him, so he holds Jesse as close as he can and lets himself pretend, just this once, that if you love someone enough it will somehow protect them. 

There’s no telling how long they sit there. The sobs die away slowly, leaving only deep unsteady breathing in their wake, Jesse’s body warm and boneless in Hanzo’s arms. 

In the aftermath there is a peculiar tug of memory in Hanzo’s mind, a brief flash of the night his mother died, of cold night air and colder stars and hot acrid smoke burning his eyes, being lifted up and cradled against his father’s chest, even though everyone had said Hanzo was too old to be picked up and carried years ago at that point — lips brushing softly over the top of his head and his father’s shaky breathing even as his hands were perfectly steady, as always. He shivers himself at the recollection without quite knowing why and clutches Jesse closer still, shutting his eyes as he turns his face into his hair. 

Jesse pulls back a little and looks at him, flushed and unsettled and messy-haired, his eyes swollen and red and his cheeks stained with tears — he seems like a little boy, suddenly, so endlessly breakable. 

Hanzo cups Jesse’s face between his palms and leans forward to kiss his forehead, lips lingering against sweaty, fever-hot skin. 

“I love you,” he says. It seems the most important thing to make sure he knows. 

In the silence Jesse stares and stares at him, wide-eyed and open, and Hanzo knows he would die for him without a second thought and feels strange, claiming his own life for a selfish purpose like that, even only in the privacy of his own thoughts. 

But he would. He can’t change that.

(And he compounds his dishonour by knowing, beneath it all, that he wouldn’t change it if he could.) 

Finally Jesse blinks and swallows, his hand tentatively coming up to touch Hanzo’s jaw. Hanzo leans his head into the touch and smiles lopsidedly, even through the sudden upset of the disciplined, ordered structures within him. 

Jesse kisses him, his lips pain-gentle and searching, so soft, like a question — Hanzo gives the only answer he can and gathers him in close, meeting his mouth with as much gentleness as he knows how to hold. 

When he finally pulls back Hanzo wipes some of the remaining wetness on Jesse’s cheeks away with his thumb. Jesse’s eyes flicker down for a second before finding Hanzo’s again, the smallest, most tentative smile pulling at one corner of his mouth. Hanzo presses another kiss to his temple and cups the back of his head as Jesse makes a small sound and presses his face into the curve of Hanzo’s neck. 

Jesse rubs his thumb over the damp spot his tears have left on Hanzo’s shirt, sniffing. “...here I am again, ruinin’ your shirts,” he says thinly, leaning his temple against Hanzo’s shoulder. “Sorry ‘bout that.”

“Don’t be silly,” Hanzo says sternly, weaving his fingers into Jesse’s hair as he moves to sit leaned back against the wall and pulls Jesse with him.

With a wet little laugh Jesse shifts even closer, drawing one leg up to his chest and stretching the other haphazardly out on the floor. Hanzo finds Jesse’s hand with his own and is strangely relieved when Jesse twines their fingers together at once, his thumb brushing against Hanzo’s skin. 

“It was,” Hanzo says, looking at Jesse’s hand in his. “Good of you. To try to save them. Reckless and hotheaded and irresponsible,” he adds because oh, they _will_ have a good long conversation about that at some less fraught time, he is _not_ going to be on the end of a phone call like that again. “But good.”

“They’d have done the same for me,” Jesse says, then, smaller: “At least I… I thought — I thought any of us would…”

He falls silent, leans against Hanzo more heavily, a warm weight against his side. 

“Fuck,” Jesse whispers eventually, hiding his face in the curve of Hanzo’s neck again.

Like before Hanzo has no idea what to say, so he just tangles his fingers in the sweat-damp hair at the nape of Jesse’s neck, stroking through it until Jesse melts into the touch and does his usual little pleasurable shimmy against him, like a cat happy to be petted. 

“Guess this weren’t really my fuckup to fix in the first place,” Jesse sighs finally, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. “Didn’t even know what had happened until I came back from a job two days later and asked what all the long faces were about. But I really thought that we could — that I could pull it off.”

“You almost did. You came back alive. That is…” Hanzo trails off, kisses Jesse’s temple, can’t describe what it means, that he’s still here breathing under Hanzo’s hands. 

Jesse squeezes his hand. “It ain’t nothin’,” he agrees quietly, turning his face for another kiss, more assured this time, close and familiar, and leans their foreheads together, his eyes slipping shut. “When I… when I didn’t realize they were already gone at first it felt like finding my dad. Like it was happenin’ all over again.”

“Oh.” Hanzo knows that Jesse’s father died when he was eight, but not much more; Jesse has always been reluctant to elaborate on the subject and Hanzo respects that as Jesse respects his sharp places in turn, would never want to accidentally reopen old wounds and cause him unnecessary pain. “Jesse, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s nothin’,” Jesse says in a very small voice, like it’s instinct, like he doesn’t know how to not deflect attention and downplay what he feels, but more importantly he curls up closer to Hanzo like he’s seeking shelter, tucking himself against him until he’s practically in his lap with a complete lack of hesitation that makes something like contentment curl in Hanzo’s chest.

Hanzo wants to stand between him and anything in the world that could ever hurt him. 

“It is not.”

Jesse chuckles tonelessly. “No. No, you’re right, it’s not. God. I’m so fucking tired.”

“Understandably.” 

For a while they just stay together like that. Hanzo is in no hurry to move. 

Jesse reaches out and winds Hanzo’s hair around his fingers, following the coils with his eyes as he tucks them behind his ear. 

“It _is_ good to see you,” he murmurs. “Sorry I was bein’ weird about it before. Can I, uh. Give you a lift to the airport, at least?”

“What?” Hanzo says, blinking at him in confusion and then alarm as Jesse flinches a bit and pulls back to look at him. 

“I just thought — you came all this way for nothin’, and… I’m not even drunk this time, I could drive,” he says, with the air of someone who feels they’ve laid down a very compelling argument indeed. “We could catch up in the car, it’s been a while.”

“I am staying right here tonight, and probably tomorrow as well,” Hanzo says, raising an eyebrow. “I did not book a return flight yet.”

In truth there had been a deep, shadowy part of him that had planned, if the worst came to pass and Jesse — well. There was a part that had been planning a revenge so thorough and monumental that time frankly was no real consideration anymore. Having to once more step into the normal world, where hours and days and distances have meaning again is, at once, the greatest blessing of his life and a space to notice his own exhaustion. 

And remembering Jesse’s face from half an hour ago, Hanzo is not so sure he came all this way for nothing.

Jesse’s brows shoot up, eyes going wide. “But don’t you have to — your folks…”

“I am staying,” Hanzo repeats and hauls him back in, smiling into Jesse’s hair. If there are consequences, he has already taken them upon himself anyway — he has already willingly opened himself for the blow, bent his head to the blade; a few hours more or less will not change what his family decides to do or not do in response. 

He can’t bring himself to regret it just yet. 

After a while Jesse offers: “I’ve, uh. Been keepin’ something aside for a rainy day, actually. In case it’s better if you don’t come back there empty handed. Should be good, we could go get it tomorrow morning. If you’d like.”

For a moment Hanzo can say nothing, just feel the warmth of Jesse’s palm against his. Then he sighs and brushes his lips over Jesse’s temple. “You are… I…” 

“I don’t wanna make trouble for you,” Jesse mumbles, scratching the back of his neck with his free hand.

Hanzo touches Jesse’s jaw and guides his face up to meet his gaze — the redness is fading from his eyes and he looks like himself again, but there’s still an underlying brittleness to his features. “You are never trouble,” Hanzo says. “And thank you.”

 _For thinking about it,_ he thinks, _for knowing who I am and where I come from._

Jesse makes a small sound and reaches out to stroke Hanzo’s hair out of his face again, and Hanzo feels the familiar deep aching hunger beneath his skin to be close to him — not a hunger for sex, this one, but simply to touch, to be able to sleep pressed up against him, to have him safely wrapped up in his arms, to lie with their legs tangled and feel him everywhere. Sometimes, when they don’t meet for a while, he almost manages to convince himself he forgets this feeling, that it doesn’t always rest uneasily under the surface, sharp and stark like bleached bones emerging from smooth desert sand to cut the soles of his feet when he least expects it. 

He is not even sure he will be able to sleep — between the jetlag and the echo of the awful freezing terror of Jesse’s phone call still occasionally brushing against his nerves he somehow doubts it — but Jesse looks ready to fall asleep sitting right here and Hanzo needs to feel him, so he gets to his feet and reaches out his hand to Jesse.

“Let us get you in the shower,” he says. “And then to bed, I think.”

“Oh, Mr. Shimada,” Jesse says as he takes Hanzo’s hand, with an admirable attempt at coquettishness given the circumstances, “you sure know what to say to get a boy feelin’ all dizzy.” 

“I doubt you need any help with that right now.”

Jesse lets Hanzo pull him to his feet, wobbling before Hanzo steps in to steady him. For a moment he looks dazed, not looking away from Hanzo’s face. When the moment drags out Hanzo squints back at him and is about to ask him if he’s _really_ sure he didn’t get concussed again just as Jesse makes a raw sound in his throat and wraps his arms around him to pull him into what can only be described as a bear hug.

Then he lets out a sharp wheeze of pain, the same moment Hanzo blurts out: “ _Careful_ , your ribs — ”

“Ow, fuck,” Jesse laughs, though he eases his grip only enough to take the worst of the pressure off his chest, and Hanzo laughs with him and rests his palms very lightly on Jesse’s back to avoid making it worse.

“My love,” Hanzo murmurs after a while, brushing his lips over the side of Jesse’s neck.

Jesse squeezes him tighter a moment in spite of his ribs and whispers: “Partners,” sounding like he might be crying a little again and doesn’t mind if Hanzo hears it.

“Yes,” Hanzo says, unsteadily, and listens to Jesse breathe.

**Author's Note:**

> Incidentally that ‘Let me come with you’ is the precise moment Jesse knows he's going to love this man forever, no matter what else happens! Just a fun little piece of inside information for you there


End file.
